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But this science, this Dialectic essential to all the three
classes alike, what, in sum, is it?
It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings with it the power of
pronouncing with final truth upon the nature and relation of
things- what each is, how it differs from others, what common
quality all have, to what Kind each belongs and in what rank each
stands in its Kind and whether its Being is Real-Being, and how
many Beings there are, and how many non-Beings to be
distinguished from Beings.
Dialectic treats also of the Good and the not-Good, and of the
particulars that fall under each, and of what is the Eternal and
what the not Eternal- and of these, it must be understood, not by
seeming-knowledge ["sense-knowledge"] but with authentic science.
All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of
sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there plies
its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit
and falsity, and pastures the Soul in the "Meadows of Truth": it
employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the
Ideal-Forms, of the Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds
[or Categories of Being]: it establishes, in the light of
Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues from these
Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual Realm:
then, resolving the unity into the particulars once more, it
returns to the point from which it starts.
Now rests: instructed and satisfied as to the Being in that
sphere, it is no longer busy about many things: it has arrived at
Unity and it contemplates: it leaves to another science all that
coil of premisses and conclusions called the art of reasoning,
much as it leaves the art of writing: some of the matter of
logic, no doubt, it considers necessary- to clear the ground- but
it makes itself the judge, here as in everything else; where it
sees use, it uses; anything it finds superfluous, it leaves to
whatever department of learning or practice may turn that matter
to account.
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